Following the release of EMA‘s album ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’ out earlier this year, she has now announced details of a new EP to coincide with her dates supporting Depeche Mode early next year. Entitled ‘Outtakes From Exile’, it will be released on February 2nd on City Slang. Today she shares a first track from the EP, “MopTops (Twist While The World Stops)”. Listen to it below.
“I made this song two years ago with my friend Severiano Martinez who also worked on Amnesia Haze and Fire Water Air LSD” comments Erika M. Anderson, aka EMA. “He does a lot of art stuff but is also edits video — my demo of this was much slower but he approached like an editor and chopped it all up and made it much faster. It was alchemy. The lyrics were improvised, I was thinking about the 50s and 60s living under the constant threat of nuclear war… People doing the twist in a red light nuclear fallout bomb blast, about the haircuts from then, “mop tops”. But now we have these two crazy world leaders with crazy hideous hair threatening to blow each other up!”
In this album cycle, written entirely before the last presidential election, EMA situates herself in what she calls “The Outer Ring.” It’s a zone between the country and the city, both literally and figuratively — a surprisingly diverse world of people united only by poverty and tension, and by the anger that comes from having your story and your struggles erased from the narrative. The vignettes here are less about an actual place than scenes that could be unfolding anywhere in America, including the stories of recent immigrants, defiant feminists, nihilistic mall teens, police shootings, and ex-urbanites who’ve been pushed out of city centers by stagnating wages and rising expense, forced up against resentful rural communities swallowed by sprawl.
‘Outtakes From Exile’ EP track list:
1. Dark Shadows
2. MopTops (Twist While The World Stops) – YouTube
3. I Don’t Treat Anything Good
4. From The Love That We Made
5. Breathalyzer Instrumental (EMA long cut)
EMA European live dates 2018:
January
15 Monday – Dresden, DE @ Groovestation
16 Tuesday – Berlin, DE @ Auster-Club
17 Wednesday – Berlin, DE @ Mercedes-Benz Arena (w/ Depeche Mode)
19 Friday – Berlin, DE @ Mercedes-Benz Arena (w/ Depeche Mode)
21 Sunday – Nuremburg, DE @ Arena Nürnberger (w/ Depeche Mode)
23 Tuesday – Paris, FR @ Le Supersonic Festival
24 Wednesday – Bordeaux, FR @ Bordeaux Metropole Arena (w/ Depeche Mode)
26 Friday – Luzern, CH @ Sedel
27 Saturday – Milan, IT @ Mediolanum Forum (w/ Depeche Mode)
29 Monday – Milan, IT @ Mediolanum Forum (w/ Depeche Mode)
31 Wednesday – Prague, CZ @ O2 Arena (w/ Depeche Mode)
February 2018
01 Thursday – Brno, CZ @ Leitnerova Club
02 Friday – Budapest, HU @ BSA (w/ Depeche Mode)
03 Saturday – Kosice, SK @ Tabačka Kulturfabrik
04 Sunday – Vienna, AT @ Stadhalle (w/ Depeche Mode)
